A Shade of Vampire 14: A Dawn of Strength Read Online Free PDF Page B

find himself, he’ll find a way.”
    Finally seeing the truth in my words, Sofia broke down, falling to her knees. I knelt with her, clutching her hands. “Darling, as much as we want to, this is a battle that we simply can’t fight for him.”
    As Sofia shook in my arms, I cast my eyes back up to the TV screen. That vision of my son ripping into the throat of an innocent young woman would forever be etched in my memory.
    I couldn’t get over the fact that this was the first time a vampire had been broadcast to the world like this. Even the black witches’ vampires had managed to keep themselves concealed when stealing away humans.
    If someone had told me that my own son would be the first vampire to break this code of secrecy, I would have thought them mad.

Chapter 6: Rose
    I took Caleb to visit Corrine and Ibrahim in the Sanctuary first thing the next morning. To my relief, not only had the two of them come to, they were walking around their home as usual.
    It was Corrine who answered the front door. As soon as she laid eyes on me, her face lit up. She flung her arms around me and pulled me in for a tight embrace.
    “Rose, my darling. We have so much to catch up on. You must tell me everything.”
    And so we sat in her living room for the next few hours. I recounted all the details of my story to her, and I was stunned as she told me her tale. I was furious at how the white witches had treated their own kind, and I felt incredibly guilty that they’d gone through all that suffering just because they’d been trying to find me. Once we were caught up on each other’s stories, I reached for Caleb’s hand. Corrine had warmed up to him considerably during the course of our conversation.
    Standing up, I unbuttoned his shirt and slid it off his shoulders so Corrine could see the damage that had been done to him by the South American thugs.
    Her eyes widened as she moved closer to the vampire and looked over the wounds. “These bullets are lodged deep,” she murmured. She shot a look at me. “You might not want to be here to watch this, Rose.”
    “I’m staying,” I said firmly.
    “Okay.” Corrine sighed and led us to her spell room. She cleared the long wooden table in the corner and placed a plastic covering over it. Grabbing a cushion from one of the chairs, she placed it at the edge of the table as a pillow. She gestured for Caleb to lie down. He lifted himself up and stretched out. I walked to the edge of the table and stood by his head.
    “We’ll work on the chest area first, then the shoulders and back,” the witch said. She grabbed a bottle of bright blue liquid and began dabbing it over Caleb’s wounds with a cotton swab.
    Corrine looked down seriously at Caleb. “Now, this could be quite painful. Do you want me to give you some kind of painkiller to make it more bearable?”
    “I’ll be all right,” Caleb muttered.
    I looked at the sharp metal tools Corrine had started pulling out of a drawer and wiping down with the blue solution. She must have caught my expression, because she smirked. “Don’t look so scared, Rose. This procedure looks more primitive than I intend it to be. I’ll mix up a potion that will help the bullets loosen from the flesh and slide out easily. These tools are mostly to help lift them out.” She walked over to me and gripped my hand. “I’ll make this as quick for your man as I possibly can.”
    I walked with the witch over to the sink and watched as she began pulling bottles of colorful ingredients off the shelves and mixing them up in a small brown cauldron. She brought the mixture to a boil quickly, then muttered a few words to cool it. We walked with the cauldron back over to Caleb. Setting it down next to her tools, she disappeared from sight for a moment before reappearing with a long, white sheet. I helped her spread it out over Caleb.
    As she set to work, I mostly couldn’t see what she was doing because she was deliberately using the sheet as a shield.